Mandatory Fun: potentially 140,000 copies sold??

[senorconebra]

I've been seeing blips of Al on 7 News out of Boston, and last night they said very nice things about him and how he hit #1, and today they said the album was PIRATED 40,000 times before release.

ouch.

Thoughts??

[TMBJon]

I don't know if 40,000 copies pirated vs. 104,000 copies sold is considered a high or low ratio of piracy. However I would say there's really not much that can be done about it, and also he's #1 in the country so

[AlejandraDD]

I'd say there are two kinds of people who would download a pirated album:
1) Those who will go ahead and buy it if they like it (like people on this forum)
2) Those who would never ever pay for an album in their lives (the vast majority of people who pirate). They won't say "oh, I can't pirate it so I HAVE to buy it now" if it's not available to them for free

The amount of downloads is an indicator of something's popularity, but in my opinion, you can't count pirated downloads as any kind of "loss" of money.

[Teh Dingo]

This is more an indictment of the music industry than Al.

if Al sold 104,000 copies and it was pirated 40,000 times, than the projected number one for next week, 5 Seconds of Summer, would sell 250,000 copies and be pirated....120....140....a bunch of thousand of times (I'm not good at math, ok? Get off my back! )

They could've picked any album to note the pirating. Pretty random choice to go with Al, but ok.......

[TMBJon]

They could've picked any album to note the pirating. Pretty random choice to go with Al, but ok.......

That's what I meant in my last post. I'd like to see some figures for other "mainstream" releases and how many pirated copies there were of those.

[Well, Well, Well]

the only thing that would be a problem is if Jason Marz sold less copies but would have overtaken Al if he had more pirated copies. I agree, I'd almost rather have this thread merged with General Al Discussion or something, because this says more about the music business.